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News Briefs 30-07-2010

My god, it’s full of… planets?

Thanks Greg!

Quote of the Day:

“..I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

I. Newton

  1. Touchable holograms

    That’s right nerdlings, with this contraption, you could not only talk to that Princess Leia hologram, but you could actually lovingly caress her cinnamon bun-like tresses. If that ain’t progress, we don’t know what is.

    Not that I dare to betray my geeky brethren who have *also* fantasized with that kind of gadget, but… dontcha feel that the only driving force in technology nowadays is entertainment?

    Sure it’s nice to have an iPhone that you can use to view a lot of fun & dumb video-clips at Youtube —not to mention a whole lotta PORN— but shouldn’t we also be encouraging young engineers to worry about the development of technology that could also, you know, SAVE lives or help us colonize space?

    A society in which young people aspire either to be movie stars, rappers, or —if they are smart enough— the founders of the new Facebook, is not exactly what I had in mind for the Brave New World of the XXIst century :-/

  2. What a twist
    A universe with no end… or beginning.

    That is a pretty interesting theory and actually made a good amount of sense, specifically on red shifting. I’m interested on what this theories take on lighter elements getting heavier and how(if) they break down.

  3. Flapdoodle?
    Shermer citing Stenger … should we expect an unbiased opinion? Oh, I think not. For anyone unfamiliar with the musings of physicist-philosopher, Victor Stenger this page should give you a flavour of what he’s about:

    http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/vic_stenger/

    Apart from his militant (he calls it “positive”) atheism, his main (and obviously related) targets are those who argue in favour of fine tuning in the universe and those who would introduce consciousness into quantum physics. I’m clearly not a physicist nor a mathematician but it seems to me that, in a rather desperate attempt to avoid consciousness, his alternatives are at least as questionable as those he is trying to dismiss. For example, he introduces particles zig-zagging backwards and forwards in time to resolve the question of non-locality:

    http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/localepr.html

    His attack on the idea of a finely tuned universe, although often cited by the sceptical community, has in turn been attacked. This is a quote from a blog entry by another physicist:

    [Quote=Luke Barnes] It is a distraction, encouraging us to simply look the other way, to condescending dismiss the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe for life. It is utter garbage, thinly concealed behind a veil of mathematics.

    The worst part is that others are taking Stenger’s work as the definitive debunking of fine-tuning.

    http://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/no-faith-in-monkeygod-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-victor-stenger-part-2/

    [/quote]

    Dave.

    PS – That same scientist also has some interesting observations about another well known sceptic, P. Z. Myers:

    http://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/fishing-while-the-world-burns-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-p-z-myers/

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